Reagan Aides Explore Deal On Contra Arms

March 25, 1986|By KNT News Service

WASHINGTON — The Reagan administration, anxious to strike a bipartisan compromise with Senate Democrats on its aid package for Nicaraguan rebels, hinted Monday it was willing to extend its timetable for delivering weapons, but held firm against other concessions demanded by the senators.

Still smarting from a defeat on the issue handed to him last week by the House, President Reagan authorized aides to deal with his Senate opponents to forge a bill that will attract more than a token number of Democratic votes.

The administration hopes to gain bipartisan approval in the Senate as a means of pressuring the Democrat-controlled House to reconsider its position. As Reagan telephoned several senators to plead for support of his $100 million aid proposal, his legislative experts joined Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, R-Kan., in intensive talks with Sen. James Sasser, D-Tenn., and other Democrats who express a willingness to extend conditional assistance to the anti-government contras in Nicaragua.

One Senate Democratic aide said ''two sticking points'' were blocking an agreement. One, the aide said, concerned Sasser's insistence that Congress -- after a delay in which negotiations with Nicaragua's ruling Sandinistas would be vigorously explored -- take a second vote on permitting military assistance to the contras.

The other, the aide said, dealt with the Democrats' demand that the United States undertake direct bilateral talks with the Sandinistas.

Reagan has resisted both conditions.

A second vote, the president says, would envelop the aid issue in continued uncertainty and encourage the Sandinistas to resist negotiations and even to step up military operations against the contras.

Reagan wants a bipartisan commission to monitor negotiation efforts and then certify whether the U.S. government has tried in good faith to pursue talks. Upon such certification, the president says, he would then be free to deliver military aid as he saw fit.